You might want to check out the rest of his work, too: it’s got avian , amphibian, insectoid and cacti humanoids (Bas-Lag books), or deals with pinko-commi-social-liberal ideas in oppressive city states (all of them). The City & the City is one of my all-time favorite books!

if you had any free time, you might also want to look into Peter Watts’ rifters trilogy. a mite on the depressing, end-of-the-world-is-nigh-hooray side, but crackling good reads with decent deep sea hard sci-fi background (and how often do you see that?).

I’ll be on the outer here to say I’m not a big fan of Miéville’s work. I didn’t mind King Rat and I quite liked Un Lun Dun, but I couldn’t get into Perdido Street Station at all. I ended up skimming the last two thirds of it, just to find out how it ended, and didn’t bother with the sequal.

I can’t imagine why you recommended it PZ, but to reciprocate, I’d like to recommend “Salvation in Death” by J.D. Robb (a pseudonym of Nora Roberts), which is the 27th in a series of police detective novels set in and after the year 2059. This one starts with a Catholic priest being murdered during a requiem mass, poisoned taking communion. You’d enjoy the hero of the series Eve Dallas referring to “the cracker”, and wanting to take the leftovers for examination, to the consternation of the other priests.

Miéville is an ultra-smart writer. Sadly, I’m not ultra-smart anymore (if I ever were) and I had a tough time understanding the first few chapters of The City and the City. I’m glad I persisted; by the time the inevitable ending arrived, I was sad to leave that odd world.
I can hardly wait for this new book. I’ll be first in line at the library.

Q.E.D. I can’t speak for OFL but for myself I only read digital editions. Yup, this limits my choices especially because I live in Australia and the antiquated rules on regional publishing mean I can’t buy anything from US publishers.

So, why do I limit myself? First because I live in a small town with no bookstore.

Second, because I have trouble justifying the resources used to produce the books I read. I think that the resources and energy I use over the life of my ebook reader will be far less than those used to get a paper copies into my hands. This is a mere assertion of course, I could very well be wrong about this. If anyone has actual numbers I’d be very grateful to see them.

Third, I managed a used bookstore for almost 20 years. In any given used bookstore I walk into I’ll know at least half the overall stock and an overwhelming majority of the books in my preferred genres. It was always a problem in the store I ran to get titles that we had never seen before. Despite the millions of books published each year only a very few trickle down to the used market. I have much better luck finding new reads on-line.

Obviously I’m a unique case, but you’re making a bunch of assumptions about OFL that might not be warranted.

austinfilm, Hello to you too and thanks for that. Mind you, I’ve a Bebook rather than a Kindle. When I bought it the Kindle wasn’t available in Australia. I’m also a little ambivalent about Miéville’s work. I’ve enjoyed some and struggle with others. I think I’ll wait until it comes down in price.